Tag: General Hardware

It’s Not an Anti-Jailbreaking Patch

I don’t get the iPhone and anti-iPhone communities. Seriously what the fuck do either of these groups of zealots think? Oh that’s right they don’t. One side is rabidly for the iPhone and can find no ill-will in anything Apple does. The other side of the fence has the rabid dogs that can find no good in the iPhone. Personally I’m between the two (with a gun so I don’t get bitten of course) as I’m logical enough to find both pros and cons to the platform (although my main problem is with Apple’s draconian practices I fully admit it’s a very nice device).

Recently an exploit was found that allowed people to jailbreak their phone via visiting a website. A day or two ago Apple finally released a patch that fixed that vulnerability and now the anti-iPhone zealots are claiming they only patched it to stop jailbreaking. That’s bull shit.

The reason they patched it is because of how the vulnerability allowed jailbreaking. Due to a flaw in the PDF reading software included with the iPhone malicious code was able to elevate to root privileges. One on hand this allowed jailbreak. There is of course the other hand which is the vulnerability allowed the running on any arbitrary code as a root user. That means a root kit could be uploaded and installed onto an iPhone by just getting the user to visit a web page.

I’m all for jailbreaking and believe if you buy a device you can do whatever you want with it. I also think Apple are complete assholes for how restrictive they are with the phone (but it is their device and they can make it however they want, I just won’t buy it in this case). But this hole they’re fixing is a major security issue and needs to be fixed. Ironically if you went to the jailbreak website and jailbroke your phone there was a patch already available to correct the vulnerability but could only be installed via jailbreaking. Now that’s irony you just can’t buy!

iPhone Users are Whores

A graphic has been going around as of late claiming to depict that iPhone users get more sex than Android and Blackberry users. Of course they don’t actually read the y-axis that is labeled “avg. number of sexual partners @ age 30.” Going by what that graph actually says iPhone users are whores while Android users are far more faithful to their significant others.

Game, set, match!

Your “No Duh” Security Story of the Week

Apparently PC Pro likes to be late to the game. They are reporting that modern smart phones are vulnerable to “smudge attacks.” So what is a “smudge attack?” It’s a fancy term for saying you can look at the finger prints on the touchscreen of a phone to determine the password or unlock pattern for the phone.

Of course the simple and free solution; just wipe your phone’s screen off on your shirt periodically. Hell I do this naturally already because the finger prints make the screen hard to read.

New Kindle Up for Pre-Order

Speaking of competition for Barnes and Nobel Amazon has their new Kindle up for pre-order. The new models share the same improvements of their recently released DX cousin. The new Kindle has the options of either black or white and either Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi with 3G. They screen supposedly has a 50% higher contrast ration and the internal storage has been bumped up to 4GB.

Yes I pre-ordered one; black with 3G. I’m a fan boy of this device and I realize that. But I’ll certainly have a review of it once I have it in my hands for a couple of weeks.

Tethering Your Android Phone

I love my Evo 4G. One of the most useful features of the phone in my opinion is the ability to tether other device’s to the Evo’s data connection through it’s Wi-Fi card. But Sprint wants to charge you $30.00 a month for this feature. Being a cheapskate I’m going to show you how to save money by getting Wi-Fi tethering working on your phone for free.

Enter androind-wifi-tether a free application that allows you to tether your laptop to the Evo’s data connection. This means anywhere you have data connectivity on your Evo you have Internet access on your laptop. The newest version of android-wifi-tether now supports WPA-PSK2 encryption which fixes my main criticism with the previous versions I’ve seen. Now I feel that android-wifi-tether is ready for the big leagues.

In order to use android-wifi-tether you must root your phone. Enter Unrevoked 3. Unrevked 3 is an application that runs on your computer (be it Windows, Linux, or Mac) and roots you phone. It also flashes a custom recovery partition to it. What’s a custom recovery partition? If you don’t know don’t worry about it, you don’t need to know what it is.

Before you start here is a big warning. Using Unrevoked 3 will almost certainly void the warranty on your phone.

Anyways Unrevoked 3 is going to be pretty straight forward and will tell you exactly what steps you need to take to root your phone. Once that’s done I advise using nandroid (you’ll see it when the phone boots) to backup everything on your phone (another advantage to rooting) to your SD card.

Once you’ve done that navigate your Evo’s browser to the android-wifi-tether download page and grab the latest version that will work with your phone (the phones each version works with is listed next to the download link). Once the file is downloaded install the .apk file and you now have an application called wireless tether. Run that application to turn on Wi-Fi tethering. The options to set the SSID and WPA key are in the menu under the settings section.

Congratulations you now have free Wi-Fi tethering!

Thank God for Air Conditioning

You know I’ve always been a fan of air conditioning. This most likely derives from the fact that I don’t do well in heat and thrive in the -20 degree weather of Minnesota’s winters. I now have another reason to love air conditioning courtesy of the Red Star:

Q What is your theory on how air conditioning has influenced politics?

A In 1960, only about 12 percent of homes were air-conditioned. Then it really took off and made it possible for larger populations to move to hotter regions, the South and the West. The Northeast and the Midwest have increased in population just 27 percent over that time, while the South and West have grown more than four times that much. The economic and political centers of gravity moved along with the population from the North to the Sun Belt, which traditionally is more conservative, bringing more red-state seats to the Electoral College. If we would have had the population distribution in 2000 that we had in 1960, Al Gore would have won the presidency.

That’s right air conditioning may have cost Al Gore the presidency. God I love air conditioning and irony, especially when they’re combined. Speaking of Gore how much do you think he spends to air condition his multi-million dollar mansion?

A Trackpad for Your Desktop

Do you have a laptop with a trackpad? Do you wish you could take that trackpad and hook it up to your desktop instead of having a real mouse available? If you answered yes to the second question Apple has you covered now. Oh and I question your sanity.

But I also think this could be kind of useful. On one hand I’m not a huge fan of trackpads but on the other hand I’m a huge fan of the multi-touch features of my MacBook Pro’s trackpad.

Here I’ll Save You Evo 4G Owners Some Money

Let’s say you purchased an Evo 4G and decided you wanted a spare battery because the phone drinks fuel like a Ford F350. If you go to the Sprint store they want roughly $40.00 for it and that’s only if they have it in stock. Yes just finding a spare Evo 4G battery in stock is like pulling teeth. So what do you do? You buy a spare battery for the HTC Touch Pro 2.

The battery in the Evo 4G has the model number RHOD160. It’s the same 1500 mAh battery that HTC used in a few other phones including the Touch Pro 2, CDMA Hero, and the Snap S511. The only difference is the OEM battery included with the Evo 4G has a red case on it instead of a black one. Since the battery cover hides the battery I’m more than willing to live with the fact that my battery is the “wrong” color when I’m saving $29.00. Yes the exact same battery can be had, brand new, for $11.00 plus shipping.

I ordered one and have it running in my Evo 4G right now. And it’s a good thing I did because when I pulled out the OEM battery I noticed it’s swelling which means it’s probably getting ready to go boom. That’s the other lesson today, check the batteries on your electronic devices for bulges and swelling periodically. For lithium-ion batteries that’s an indicator that somebody really bad is likely to happen in the near future.

Finger Pointing at It’s Finest

Let’s say you’re a multi-billion dollar technology company who puts out a phone almost everybody seems to want. Now let’s say you release a new phone which has a slight problem, it drops calls when being held in a user’s left hand. What do you do? Well you could recall the phone or offer an in-store hardware fix.

Or if you’re Apple you could point the finger at everybody else and claim you’re phone is still good because everybody has similar issues. I guess I do like one thing about that page, it shows the Jesus Phone isn’t actually better than other phones on the market. Apple zealots always claim Apple makes hardware that’s far better than the competition but in actuality that’s just a total pile of shit (yes they make nice hardware, but so do many other companies).